


The Dreaming Spire

by paperiuni



Category: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Genre: Action/Adventure, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Partnership, Post-Canon, Romance, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 13:03:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2851673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She feels like a hundred instead of nineteen. Like someone opened a valve and poured a century's worth of sorrow into her head.</i>
</p><p>Trip and Monkey make an escape, a discovery, and a decision, and fall in love a little. (Set right after the game.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dreaming Spire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [radiophile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/radiophile/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide to you! I was thrilled to see Enslaved requested this year, and couldn't resist working out a last-minute treat. I hope this falls in line with what you wanted. <3
> 
> I realise that among all else that the game's ending leaves ambiguous, it's not entirely clear if the headband is still working or not. I picked one possible take for this story.
> 
> I should also note that creative liberties were taken with the technology in this story, since the game is set in a vague-ish future where tech has first developed beyond what we know and then regressed in probably weird and unpredictable ways.

The banged-up rifle gleams in the sand. The metal of the long barrel scatters the sunlight and draws her eye across the dry brush and outcroppings of rock.

She feels like a hundred instead of nineteen. Like someone opened a valve and poured a century's worth of sorrow into her head. The gun's warm in her hand when she picks it up, the notched wood of the grip rough to her fingers.

"Trip."

"Yeah. Coming."

The horizon shimmers; sand and sky meet in a wavering line. It hurts her eyes to look. _How the hell did Pyramid get all the way out here?_ The necessity of survival thrusts through the numb layers of her grief. She's starting to think like Monkey.

He's crouched on top of the tallest dune nearby, like the tiny elevation could push the horizon farther out in his sight. She joins him in staring at the massive wreckage of the Leviathan.

"Can't see anything but desert. Too far to walk."

"There's got to be something," she makes herself say. "Like the slave ship." _How narrowly we missed ending up like those people._

Monkey stands. "Do a scan around the building. There's nowhere to hide out here except underground."

They turn back towards the giant, smooth-walled structure that juts out of the ground. Trip scampers to keep up with his loose, loping strides, but if she falls too far behind, he adjusts his pace.

They've decided to survive. She slings Pigsy's battered gun over her shoulder by the strap.

*

Monkey braces himself into the crack between the twisted steel door and its jamb and pushes. Inch by inch the door grinds open. Trip's scan of the vaulted space beyond comes up clean.

It's a hangar. The slat of light from the door reveals a system of jointed steel bars and flexible tubes on the ceiling that would fold the roof open. Her mind creeps after the minutiae of the hydraulic engineering in spite of herself.

"Over here." Monkey throws aside a dirty tarp. The vehicle is crude but sturdy. It has a hull fitted with a sail and a small engine that turns a turbine attached to the rear. Three wide runners protrude from under it. Trip abandons the ceiling for this simpler mechanical marvel, because it may actually get them out of here.

"This place is big enough for an airship."

Monkey follows her with his eyes. "Like the one you crashed?"

"I just took advantage of some gaps in their security." God, is that trying to be a joke? If she thinks about anything but their next step in getting out of here, she'll shatter. "I think I can get this moving."

The power source is in place, thank whichever forgetful former user that left it there. Whoever it was, was tied up in Pyramid's lies. What has she _done_?

Monkey scavenges an assortment of tools for her from the recesses of the hangar. She gives the sand skimmer a once-over, trying to check all the obvious potential problems. He only bothers her to hold up a half-empty waterskin. "Not much left," is his succinct warning.

She drinks, then returns to work. They don't hear a whisper from outside save for the whistle of the wind.

*

_They stumble into the light of day the way they came. Only when she inhales the dusty desert air Trip realises how stagnant and dead the guts of the pyramid were. Monkey has a heavy, irresistible hand pressed to the small of her back._

_She wants out. The confused, wailing voices drifting behind them reach for her like scrabbling claws. He can't make a barrier of himself for her. He'd try. Headband or no headband, he'd try._

_Would he pull this pain from her like she pulled those people from their world? Could he, if she asked?_

*

The night air at least blows away her dreams with its biting chill. She's grateful for the tarp that they stole--that they _took_. You can't steal from slavers, from thieves of people.

She's awake before her watch. Huddling up with the mast at his back, Monkey takes the offer to nap, and she wraps the tarp around him after he falls asleep. Far in the west, she fancies she can see another shade of blue between the shale of the desert and the indigo of the sky. Something that's not dirt and drought.

*

The dips and rises of the foothills are discernible in the distance when the sand skimmer bucks, the engine coughs, and the power source blinks out into irreversible dimness. The sun's climbing. They would've had to stop for a midday break, anyway.

"Now we can walk," he says as they rig the tarp up to provide shade. "There's got to be something green in those hills."

"Monkey," she says, barely audible. That lone, quiet sound of his name veers off from the chatter they both try to keep up. At least she tries. She probably needs the talking more than he does.

"Yeah?"

"Are you okay?" Can either of them be all right after what happened? "I mean, you put on the mask, there was... whatever it was they were seeing, and then the headband..."

She throws a sideways glance at the thing that started all this. He's still wearing it, even though it's inert, dormant, after she ripped Pyramid's body from the systems that sustained his illusory world.

"You did what you did." Her mouth twists. He must notice, because he goes on, "That was a lot of people. Hundreds. Can't remember the last time I saw that many people in one place."

"Where are they _from_?" She crawls under the tarp, too keyed up to doze off like she should. They need the cooler hours for travel.

"Who knows?" Monkey folds to sit in the other corner, leaving her space to lie down. "I've been off the map since the slavers got me."

"I didn't go outside the walls a lot, either." The words taste bittersweet. Neither of them have much idea where they are. They've just kept going west. "I... it makes you wonder how all those people ended up there."

 _You looked_ , she thinks. _You saw what they had. What I took away._

"You think too much." Reaching over, he sets a hand on her shoulder. "Get some shut-eye."

As if the weight of his hand could ease her down into sleep, she curls up to wait for it.

*

After one more night of mostly silent, dogged trekking, they do find green. The rocky ground sprouts with sparse patches of tough grass and the first timid trees. A snaking rill below a tumbled-down slope slakes their thirst. They linger by the water for the scorching noon hours, and Trip remembers there are other smells in the world beside dust. The trees get taller and more verdant as they forge on towards the distant mountains.

A few days later, they've broken trail, and Trip is trying to sleep in a mossy hollow formed between the roots of a tree. The snap of Monkey's staff extending jerks her from her lulled thoughts.

He has time to shout, "Get back!" before half a dozen mechs leap at them. The machines may look different from the ones they've fought on their journey, but the subtleties fly past her. Coated in crumbling chrome and equipped with razor-sharp blades attached to their arms, they converge on the obvious target: Monkey. He knocks the foremost one into the second with a scything sweep of his staff. Taking the opportunity, another one levers a gun mounted to its arm.

"On your left!" Trip screams. He gets his shield up in time, and the burst of ammo ricochets aside. Hunkering behind the tree, she scrambles to set off the EMP. The clearing where they stopped is a mess of hulking mechs, with Monkey darting and rolling and swinging among them. He swears, rough and pained. Metal crunches, and there's the stuttering wail of a malfunctioning mech. That hit landed where it was supposed to.

That leaves five. _Come on, come on._ She slams down the command with unsteady fingers. The pulse fires.

The grinds and thumps of the mechs moving are abruptly cut off, to be replaced by the stammers of their electronics trying to reboot. Combat mechs have system redundancies that will keep the downtime short, but it should be enough time for Monkey to take them down.

"Trip?" comes his voice, oddly close to the ground. "Oh, shit."

"Monkey?" Alarm seizes her as she rounds the tree. "I'm here!" He's down. That isn't supposed to _happen_. 

Pigsy's rifle is leaned against the tree roots by her sleeping spot. Past the roots, five mechs shiver in crumpled piles, stuck in place. Monkey staggers up. His face is a mask of red rivulets, and she swallows a cry at the sight. "Oh, oh god."

" 'S nothin'. Give me the staff." A dash of his forearm clears his face and smears the blood in his hair.

 _Do as he says. Panic later._ He visibly gathers himself as she rushes to pick up his weapon. She'd wield it herself if she had the strength--or precision--to hammer through the mechs' chassis. Gripping the staff, he strikes the first mech at the joint of its metal hips and spine and wrecks the pistons. The next one is a tougher sort, and a grunt of fury or frustration escapes him in between blows.

Trip hovers. The wound on his forehead still bleeds. The third mech stops jerking only after half a dozen strikes, and he teeters as he stands up.

Off to her right, the last two uncoil from their short circuit as if they were a single unit. Monkey is saved by a headlong dive to the side as the bigger one lands with a spray of loose earth right where he stood.

The smaller, leaner one pounces towards her. She tumbles over a root, catches herself, and sees the gun.

The Trip that climbed out of the escape pod in the old city wouldn't have done what she now does. She scampers right under the mech's slashing arm, over the next root, and grabs the rifle. She has no extra rounds, but there were a couple left in the magazine.

If the distance were any greater the shot would never connect. The butt of the rifle slams into her shoulder with such force that she's sure it's torn out of joint. The machine pursuing her totters sideways to collapse into a heap.

At Monkey's wondering, "Trip?", she throws the gun aside and all but sways onto her knees next to him. The last mech smokes on the ground, its predatory head pounded in. As if on autopilot, she takes Monkey's jaw to check his ears. No blood. Then she can hope the blow didn't jar anything inside his skull too much.

"Thought you took that for a keepsake." She can hear his approval behind the wry comment.

"I did." Her voice goes soft against her will. "Good thing it still works."

"Yeah."

They're out of nearly everything necessary, but Trip tears off the hem of a blanket to make a bandage for his forehead. Her first-aid kit is still tucked in her small knapsack, and she sutures the gash best as she can. She makes sure that his pupils aren't unevenly dilated, and that he can follow her finger with both eyes.

"Come on," Monkey says once she's done. He sat unflinching while she worked. "Can't spend the night here."

"We came all this way, and there's still mechs." She holds a hand to his forearm as they start off. "I wish we could find something else."

He turns his hand, and she shifts hers, until their fingers link and fold together. 

Near midnight they come upon a lightning-cloven tree, alone on a hilltop. Time and weather have carved a hollow inside the trunk. Climbing up first, Monkey helps her up, and she tucks her back to his chest and her head under his chin. The sky is a hard, brilliant deep blue between the twisted branches.

She wonders if she wants to talk about the ambush, but it seems the shared, drowsy silence says enough. To herself, she tries to name what stars she can spot in order to stay awake.

*

Just past dawn, the hunting party finds them. In their defence, they are both bone-tired and more than a little loopy. Food's been scarce. Not much gets past Monkey on a normal day, but Trip's kept waking him up after short rests until she can be sure his head is all right.

They both sit bolt upright when a human voice speaks. A smattering of guns, a couple of light hunting spears, and what looks like a sword straight out of a storybook are pointed at them at the base of the tree. Seven people, all dressed simply and pragmatically, stare at them with a mixture of wariness and curiosity. The woman who addresses them has an accent Trip's never heard before. The sounds widen and lilt in odd places.

"Did you kill the scrap-piles downhill from here?" she says. " 'Course you did. Didn't bother to hide your tracks, either."

"And if we did?" For a sleep-deprived man with a possible concussion, Monkey boasts an admirable degree of gruff. "They your pets or somethin'?"

"Hell, no," she chuckles. "You might say you did us a favour. Where you from?"

"A long way to the east," Trip joins in. The weapons haven't been lowered, so she still clutches the rifle. Not that she'd shoot. The old tree might slow down climbing mechs, but not returned bullets. "We came after..."

"Slavers," Monkey supplies before she can stammer. The word is a gamble.

"Just the two of you?" The woman's deep-set eyes have an amused glint. "Took down six mechs pretty handily, too."

"It's a long story," he says. "Might even share it if you put down those weapons."

"I can do one better. We've got a settlement to the north from here. Looks like you could use a proper meal--and, no offence, a good wash."

*

Trip waves her hand through the steam rising from the wooden tub and heaves a heartfelt sigh of contentment. Her hair moulds itself to her scalp, wet and wondrously clean.

"You comin' out sometime today?" Monkey's voice drifts from behind the screen that splits the communal bathroom in two roughly equal areas. The water is raised by a system of pipes that would pique her interest on a more intellectual day.

"Five more minutes?" she pleads. The sudsy water is still warm.

"If you're late for dinner, I'm not saving you any."

"That's mean." Regretfully, she gets out of the tub. The towel she was given is worn fine and thin from use, but it, too, is clean.

"Yeah. And I'm hungry, and you're waffling."

Maybe she was. It's been so long since she's been able to let her thoughts slacken for even a minute. Surviving the airship crash, finding Monkey, the deserted, breathtaking city, her destroyed village, her dead father. Her life is tumbling down a slope and she can't see what's at the bottom.

She rode this far on a surge of youthful vengeance. Pigsy is dead because of it. Hundreds of people awoke to cold and confusion from peaceful, pleasant lives because of her choice.

"Monkey," she says as she wrings out her hair, "what are we going to tell them?"

A beat. "The truth? I was gonna let you do the talking. You're better at it."

"We're in this together, right?" She doesn't really think before she says that. His silence changes in shade and weight.

"Trip," he says in that way that brings her name into clear, sharp focus. "We ran. Maybe it was the best choice. I usually pick the one that keeps me alive."

 _But you stayed with me._ She begins tugging on the set of clothes the woman, called Hazel, lent her. They're loose on her. "So what are you saying?"

"Did we run from something, or to something?"

She makes a small, perplexed noise. "I'm... not sure. I guess I was just thinking of us. But... I haven't stopped thinking about those people. I can't stop."

He shifts, soft footfalls on the wet stone floor. "Nothing we could've done for them, just the two of us."

"Yeah." They share that knowledge and, possibly, the thought that sprouts from it now.

They haven't seen much of the settlement yet. It's a conglomeration of wooden buildings beside a creek frothing down to the foothills, complemented by a system of dry caves that go into the mountainside. Several tiered terraces have been hewn into the ridge opposite the mountain to provide space for gardens and vegetable plots. Judging by the sheen of wear and lives lived on it, it goes back at least a couple of generations.

As communities go, it is a prosperous one. It sits reasonably close to Pyramid's desert hideout.

"There could be people there that Pyramid took from this place," Trip says low. She also understands that no community, however thriving, can take in all the hundreds that Pyramid had captured.

"It'd be a start." Monkey meets her as she comes around the screen, both of them still barefoot. "If you want."

She decides. "I'll talk to them."

*

Dinner is plain, porridge from cracked grain and a thick bean stew, served with strong tea of mixed herbs. They sit cross-legged on the floor with about two dozen other people of various ages and appearances and eat in reverent silence.

Hazel, the leader of the hunters, crouches down across from them after they've finished their second helpings. She listens to their story, with Trip recounting most of it, with raptor-like attention that Trip can tell Monkey returns past her shoulder. Two fighters--two protectors--gauging each other.

Monkey doesn't ease up much when Hazel takes them across the settlement to "see someone that's dying to meet you". Trip left the gun behind as a show of good faith, and probably Hazel could see she barely knows how to shoot it, but nothing can part Monkey from the staff fixed to his bracer.

She tries to decide if his tension is healthy suspicion of a bunch of strangers or something else. Hazel leads them up a flight of stairs to the second storey of a building.

"Knock," she instructs them. "Won't need to knock twice. It's been a dog's age since Sand had visitors from the outside world."

*

The whole upstairs appears to be a single big room. Gas lamps are scattered sparingly among the bookcases, work tables and mechanical devices in disparate degrees of completeness. A tall, portly man greets them at the door with a smile that seems too gentle for his wide, intelligent face. He's going bald around the temples.

"Here are our travellers from afar! Come in, sit, sit."

There are exactly three empty chairs in the room, around a table in the centre. Trip shakes Sand's hand and seats herself in one chair. Monkey hangs back a step to take stock of the room.

"You're..." Trip tries to find the right word. Something about the room--not the details, but the general trappings, its core _purpose_ \--is so familiar it aches. "A researcher?"

"On a good day." Sand laughs. "I tinker, as you can see. We are a lucky community. Enough people to raise a proper defence when trouble comes knocking, in a fertile enough place that we can live. That leaves time for thinking, now and then."

"But not too lucky." Monkey's stopped in front of a drawing hung on the wall. "You get too lucky, raiders or slavers will band together to get you."

Trip frowns at his back. "Someone's got a thorn in their toe."

"Your friend has a point." Sand rubs one temple, as if not quite aware of his gesture. "We lose people. Someone goes out hunting and never returns. Mechs will leave a body, predators will leave bones. Sometimes, we find nothing."

She already draws breath for an answer when Monkey cuts in. "This drawing here. What's this?"

Pride touches Sand's voice as he goes over to Monkey. "That's the continent. The land mass where we are."

"A map." Monkey loads the word with significance. "It's accurate?"

"Yes, I'd dare to say so," Sand says. "I've been able to compare it to three others."

In his safe room, Trip's father had databanks, more precious than grain, than salt or metal, from the days before the war. The hardware that they were stored on was too complicated to build anymore. Her wrist computer, too, is a relic that runs on a retrofitted solar cell. Sand's knowledge seems to be mostly on paper, rather than hard disks, but it's similarly invaluable.

"Can you show us?" She rises, all eagerness. "Where are we on here?"

Sand points at a spot on the eastern edge of the mountain range that dominates the western side on the map. "Here. I've never seen the ocean on the other side of the mountains, but the map tells me it's there."

"The sea was to the east," Monkey says. "Right, Trip?"

"What--oh." He means the sea outside the city where they met. The implication dawns on her. Her finger lands delicately on the glass pane that protects the map. The legend gives her the scale, and she exhales in a burst of air. "That's a long way."

Monkey nods, and glances at her, and for a moment she forgets that they're not alone.

"I heard about your travels." Sand pulls her back from her reverie. "Hazel was brief, but clearly they're extraordinary. You say that you defeated this slaver with a mech? The 'Leviathan'?"

"A commandeered mech, sort of," she says. "I've--we've learned a lot about them lately." Too much, maybe, when you count the cost. When she sits again, Monkey lingers by her chair, but he's no longer so on guard.

"I can see--or I can hope, Tripitaka--that you understand the worth of what I've gathered here." Sand grows serious, though his voice remains quietly affable. "Most of it is scraps, whether metal or knowledge. The world overflowed with knowledge once."

She nods. Words seem to desert her. He is not her father, her father is dead and is not here, but something tugs at her inexorably. _This world is not lost. We can still survive. We can build and rebuild._

"You want to help those people you freed, no?" Sand looks straight at her.

She answers with what is only the truth, even if it can never be an unmixed one, "Yeah."

"Then it seems to me you need a favour from us," he says, "which is just as well. I think there is a way we can help each other."

*

When Trip finishes her talk with Sand, the new crescent moon is high in the sky. She tries to slip silently into the sleeping alcove Hazel appointed to her and Monkey, a bunk bed concealed behind a curtain off a common room. Of course he's awake. He'd probably sleep better in the open air.

He's sprawled out on the bottom bunk, loose-limbed and a little out of place. "How'd it go?"

 _You could have stayed_ , she thinks. "I think we got to an understanding. They'll send scouts out. And... we've got a job to do. There's a place in the mountains that Sand wants us to look at."

"Mm-hm?"

"I think..." She unlaces her shoes, staring down at her working hands. "They've preserved a lot of important things here, but it's fragmented. My community had a lot more knowledge about computers, digital systems, and so on."

"He wanted to trade for what you know?" She can't quite read his voice.

"We did tell them that we stole the mechs' biggest gun," she says. "That might make us experts. So we've got to get to this place, investigate what's there, and come back to report."

His jaw twitches, then relaxes. "Right." A pause. "And after that?"

She slumps to sit on the edge of the bed. "What d'you mean, 'after that'?"

"We were supposed to get you back to your community, Trip." His eyes fall shut. "They're not _yours_ , these people, but..."

She holds her breath, because an errant wisp of air could break the moment. He is trying to put something forward that she doesn't know how to take.

 _"Turn it back on."_ She did, until Pyramid's demise rendered the headband dormant. Not that she's had a look at it since.

"Scoot over," she mumbles. "One thing at a time, okay?"

It's a terrible cop-out, and she's probably a worse coward. Still, blessedly, he moves enough to make room for her and lets her tuck herself into his side and fall asleep.

She wakes up alone, the covers pulled over her. Their few belongings--knapsacks, waterskins, her scavenged tool kit--are piled on a chair. The headband has been left on top of the heap, carefully, like a precious thing.

As she hurries to the common room, Monkey is sitting down with Hazel, listening to whatever she is explaining, nodding agreement or asking a question now and then. "Just getting ready," he replies when Trip manages to formulate a way to ask him what is going on. "We're going today, right?"

"Right," is all she can say in answer.

*

They walk, climb, backtrack and circle around for three days before Sand's carefully hand-drawn map leads them to their destination. It being summer, the mountains are harsh but navigable. They're equipped with light sleeping bags and outerwear for the cold nights. Trip cuts a walking stick for herself after the first morning of striving uphill.

Now the valley, steep and speckled with forest, lies below them in the dissipating morning mist. The building, which Sand called a _link station_ , squats on a jutting lip of rock about halfway up from the valley floor. It looks intact, up to and including the slender trunk of a mast that rises from the roof, spiked with antennae. Rows of solar panels shimmer on the roof.

Monkey squints against the easterly sun as he peers down the slope between the pines. "There's a lot of them. At least three of those broadcaster mechs, too. They're on the prowl."

Trip's dragonfly has range, but its scan might be picked up by the active mechs in turn. Thus they're eyeballing it.

Even without more sophisticated telemetry the mechs swarming in the valley are evident. Here and there the sun glitters off a dented chassis or an idly swinging arm blade.

"Why aren't there any mechs around the building?" The question seems obvious now that it occurs to her. "It looks like they're guarding it, but they're keeping their distance."

"You tell me." He shrugs. "I got something, though. The Cloud works here."

She'd almost forgotten his nimble little floating vehicle, much as she'd like to examine it in the name of engineerly understanding. It's a vestige from the world before the war, like her computer. Like the whole station down there.

"That _could_ get you through their defences. That'd only solve half our problem."

He points up the crescent-shaped cliffside that cups around the link station. It drops towards the valley at an perilously steep angle. "A bit of climbing solves the rest. We get up top and ride the Cloud straight down to the roof."

Trip is still for a little while. "That's... pretty nuts."

"It'll carry two for that long. We just gotta pull off a descent. That's easy."

"And nuts." She huffs. Something stirs in her: a wild reckless joy that she can't fully explain. "Let's do it."

*

The slope looks nearly sheer from a top-down perspective. A few wayward trees cling to it, buffeted into bowed tangles by the wind. Trip swallows a surge of vertigo.

"Should I ask if you're sure about this?"

"Hey, you agreed." She bites her cheek at his tone--low, nonchalant, _it is what it is_. She said it was fine, so he has no argument. "Getting cold feet?"

"No." Bundling up her hair, she draws the hood of her borrowed jacket over her head and pulls the strings tight. The gun has to come; she gives it to Monkey to put over his shoulder so it's between them. Nothing that can snag or catch.

He hoists her up, broad arms under her thighs. She buries her head in his neck for a moment. Grief and fear have flown from her. There's just the fierce mixture of excitement and determination.

"Ready?" The Cloud hums into life, its white corona of energy lighting under the disc.

"Ready," she says.

His silent chuckle twitches his shoulders. "Don't scream."

"Scream?" She almost manages an aggrieved tone. "I never--"

Then every muscle in her body seems to clench to hold in her shout. The wind hits them like an engine blast, but it's cold, cold and clean and cuts right to the bone. They plummet away from the edge and she grips on to Monkey for dear life. He leans left and the Cloud swims with his shift of weight lightly as its namesake. The trees whip past on either side, so close once that a long-needled bough slaps her squarely in the face. She can't hear anything over the rushing air, so she stares ahead with watering eyes as they surge towards the station and the pulsing lights of alerted mechs blink down in the valley.

The roof rings with a clang of abused metal as they alight. Monkey drops onto his haunches and off the disc, and she rolls off his back into a panting heap on the sun-warmed aluminium.

She realises the bubbling, breathless noise in the air is her laughter. He's laughing, too, leaned forward, a deep, husking sound.

"Now," he gasps. "We got a few minutes before they can get to us. And the Cloud's low on charge."

"It has to charge?" A part of her wants to lie on the roof and keep laughing with him. Her ribs ache, but it feels too wonderful to stop.

"I shouldn't have reminded you it existed, huh? No, you're not taking it apart unless you _swear_ to put it back together."

She swats him gently on the arm, then uses him as support to stand up.

*

Through a combination of hacking, brute force and a bit of lucky fumbling, they make it off the roof. There's a tiny service shed, and in its floor, a rusted hatch opens down a flight of steel-grid stairs. The roof leaks somewhere: water dribbles down in the darkness.

"So, control room." Monkey's voice echoes in the corridor. Trip keeps her battery-powered lamp pointed ahead. "Any idea what that looks like?"

"Someplace with a lot of consoles and displays?" She shakes her head. "You hear any mechs?"

"Not yet. They've gotta know we're here." 

"Yeah, that entrance would be pretty hard to miss." Any second now, it will hit her that this foray is incredibly dangerous. They should've turned back and brought reinforcements. They should've waited until cover of night. She's still giddy with daring.

"There's something written on the wall," he says. Trip turns the lamp beam so it illuminates a set of signs with helpful arrows pointing this way and that.

"Found it. Down the corridor, then left, then... down the stairs one level."

Monkey leads the way, infinitely more stealthy than her, and listens intently while she cracks the security code on the magnetic lock.

Sand knew of the existence of the station, and something of its purpose. He didn't have the technological prowess to get past the obstacles within, even if he could have sneaked past the mechs.

So much of what remains to them is hopelessly scattered. Trip knows what she knows because her father, by a quirk of fate, had access to pieces of old computer hardware. To parts and shards of skills that once were ubiquitous.

The door opens inward without a sound.

When it comes to pure, breath-gripping awe, nothing can top the feeling of stepping in front of the Leviathan's controls for the first time, but Trip exhales slow and deep. She's never seen so many displays, keyboards or computer towers, let alone in one place. They sit layered with dust, the cluttered guardians of a nearly forgotten age.

Monkey asks the pertinent question, "What's all this for?"

"It's a communication hub of some kind." She gestures. "You could send and receive data over longer distances than with a radio."

Of course the hardware itself is useful. It can be repurposed. What sends her mind swirling are the possibilities that it _contains_ , if only the data is undamaged. The solar cells might even be feeding power into the systems. They'd better be. Her plan rather hinges on it.

Her enchantment is rudely broken by the reverberating screech of metal on metal. Still distant, it comes from the corridors.

"Oh, no."

"We knew they were coming." Monkey has the staff out. He steps out of the pool of light her lamp makes. "You better start working."

"I--" At semi-random, she picks a computer unit in the middle of the room. None of them seem more important than the rest. They're all set on separate work stations, like there'd once been a large team of people working in this room.

"Look," he says. "I know this drill. I keep 'em off you, you find the thing that you think is gonna save the day."

Over the skittering sounds of approaching mechs in the corridor, Trip hears a laugh wrest itself from her throat, a shaky sound of helpless affection. 

"Okay," she whispers, and looks at him, unquestioning, ready to have her back against the mechs, against anything and everything that might come for her. "Okay."

"Do your thing."

"You do yours," she manages.

He sprints out the door and into the darkness of the corridor. Only then does she realise that without the headband, he won't be able to hear her. They've been practically glued to each other's sides since the destruction of Pyramid. She's rarely needed to do more than reach out to find him there.

She swallows hard, then goes to check if there's power in the room.

The ancient computer obediently switches on under her cautious keystrokes. She's worked with mech command systems. In comparison, the security is different but much simpler. If the operating system is strange, the underlying principle is recognisable. She's spent nineteen years of her life learning everything this wild, fallen world can teach her about the subject.

 _What can you tell me?_ Forget the hurry, forget the danger. She needs to understand this place. Picking a piece from here, another from there, she builds up the picture.

She flows through command prompts and data grids, security backdoors and circumventions. Occasionally a rattle or a thud carries to her from the corridors with their winding echoes. She frees the gun and rests it against the table, ready to hand. It's hard to break away from the screen even that much.

She's on the cusp of understanding. Just a few more minutes.

The pounding footfalls that rush towards the door are not those of a mech. She leaves a command to execute and wrenches the door open.

"What is it?" She wills herself to focus on Monkey. He's huffing with exertion, but unhurt.

"Stopped them at the stairs," he says. "They'll get through the door there, though. You about ready?"

The answer to that is a resounding _no_. She knows how to scramble a mech's systems. It doesn't take finesse to wreak havoc. Here, she's rather an explorer tiptoeing through databanks spilling with wonders and conundrums.

She can't leave yet.

"Why are they coming?" she asks suddenly. "Why now?"

"They're mechs." Monkey blows out a tetchy breath, and then stops. "No, that doesn't make sense. They go after people. This would be an easy place for people to hole up in. The mechs haven't even checked."

"Not until we broke in," she says, the answer on the tip of her tongue. "They're programmed to guard this place."

There is an awful scrabbling, grating sound that can only be a mech blade against a steel door.

Gritting her teeth, she aborts the command she was running and switches to another. These computers are networked. They speak to one another. Somewhere in this unfathomable trove must be access to the mechs' command structures.

"Trip?" Monkey is pacing around, scanning the ceiling. Looking for another way out.

"Hold on, hold on..." Fear shrills her voice. She forces it down. "I found it, just a sec..."

"We don't have that many."

She struggles to make sense of the procedure unfolded on her screen. Blueprints, command scripts, safety protocols, dreamed up by people wiped out by the war. "I got it!" Then the wave of success crests from under her and her heart seems to drop. "Oh, no."

"What?" Monkey kicks aside a screen, climbs on a table and jerks open a ventilation grid in the ceiling.

"I found a way to shut them down. But it takes two people." Her throat squeezes. "One here, one at the security point."

"Where's that?"

She shows him on the blueprint, her finger wavering. It's no more than three rooms over, but it might as well be all the distance they've travelled. Monkey is a quick study, but she's grasping at a process she barely understands herself, as she goes. To wrap his head around that in time would be...

Cloth rustles, and he presses something into her hands: the headband. His hands stay wrapped over hers. "Turn it on. I can get there through the vents. You walk me through the shutdown."

"God," she whispers, a verbal vestige of wonder and terror. Both churn inside her. Standing on tiptoe, she fits the headband back into place. His eyes are shut. With a clangor that echoes from a dreamlike distance, something breaks its way through outside.

The setup is quickly done, just a repeat from before. She shuts off her computer screen and asks, "Hear me?"

"Just fine." There's something frighteningly steady in his voice.

"Go," she tells him. Otherwise she won't let him out of her sight ever again, and they'll both die. She'll never get to tell him what she's found. "Go."

*

The electromagnetic lock holds. Behind her, dents appear in the door, one after another. Trip pinions her eyes to the screen and concentrates on piecing the process into separate steps that she can give to Monkey, shaving away all her trials and errors and dead ends on the way.

She has the gun. She'd take at least one of them with her. Strange that she's skimmed so close to death so many times in the last two, three months, and now it truly hits her.

She doesn't tell Monkey that. Only passes him the next phase of the procedure.

The door caves inward from the hinged side. Hinge pins chime and snap. She set the lamp on the floor so she could see the doorway, and now, a bladed monstrosity wrenches its way through.

Trip strikes the last five keys, shouts them at Monkey through the link, and sprints towards the open ceiling vent. The mech, a quarter-ton of steel and shrieking joints, vaults over two rows of tables. A mess of equipment goes flying. She barely protects her head with an arm when a cloven monitor smashes into her, and the mech follows. Through the deafening noise Monkey calls to her.

"Finish it!" she screams, not knowing if he can hear her in turn. "I'm fine!"

The mech's optics gleam above her. The EMP must be fired from her computer. She can't bring the gun to bear. Her heart will burst or break before the machine can slice through her.

Then, between one heartbeat and the next, everything is still.

The mech's blue signal lights pulse once. It stops in the middle of the table and folds down into a hibernative crouch.

Trip staggers up and past the mech, sidles through the hole it made in the door, and races past two more that have gone quiet in the corridor. One door, two doors, three doors. The third one flies open before she can curse at the lock for more than a second.

As if she can't halt her own momentum, she barrels into Monkey, throws her arms around his neck and burrows her fingers into his hair. To her boundless relief he catches her, spinning her around so her feet leave the floor.

"Like hell you were fine." But he's laughing.

"You finished it, though." So is she, quivering, hysterical giggles that pour from her without restraint. She presses her face against his temple. "Just... never leave me again."

He breathes out, as if for a moment he'd forgotten how, against her neck.

*

They make camp on a meadow clinging to the mountainside. Their fire is the only light except for the great, shining stars of summer, though in the chilly mountain night you could mistake the season.

Trip powers up her computer after they've eaten. Monkey lounges on his opened bedroll next to her. One or the other of them has to point out the wordless, warm thing that makes them sit a little farther apart than usual. She has another topic to bring up first.

"Sand was right," she says. The glowing images on her screen are only a sliver of the truth. "That tower's part of a communication network."

He hums to let her know he's listening.

"It used to cover more than the continent." Pensively, she slides a diagram down on the screen. "The whole world. There's... a lot I'm still working out. There's these devices, called satellites, that orbit the world, far above the atmosphere. People could send and receive data from them in that station."

"Huh," he says. She'd ask if she's boring him, but she knows she isn't. 

Is this information worth the hundreds of lives that were destroyed first by Pyramid, then by her? It's only a single, solitary piece. It's also irreplaceable. In due course, it might change the world.

"It was beautiful." Monkey's staring at the sky. "Peaceful. The world Pyramid showed them. No mechs, no ruined cities, no people struggling just to stay alive."

Her arms wind around her knees. Her fists clench. "I'm not sorry."

"You wouldn't be you if you were."

 _Maybe I would be sorry for those others. It was monstrous, and it made them happy. But I would've lost you, too._ This is where it all turns.

"Do you wanna keep the headband?" It may not be the most opportune question, but it, too, gnaws at her. "I mean, it did save us. But..."

"You don't want me to wear it." He shifts.

"I don't want it to be the thing that ties us together." Suddenly there are tears hiding underneath her tone. "And I don't want to stay with Sand and Hazel and their people. I want to stay with _you._ "

"Trip." Monkey sits up behind her and scoops her in, one effortless arc of his arm, and she wraps hers around his upper arm and draws a shaky breath. "Look. We can stay a while. You wanna go hunting for satellites or seas beyond the mountains or whatever, we can go."

 _It is what it is._ And she is sad and happy, shivering with love and possibility, with Monkey's strength at her back and him standing beside her. Maybe they will go, to map this sprawling, collapsed, beautiful continent, and draw again the connections the war severed.

"Sounds great." She tips back her head to see him.

It turns out to be a clumsy business, kissing someone over your shoulder, so after a moment she turns in the circle of his arm and tries again. They get the hang of it, together, as the night goes.

*

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to AntigravityDevice for handholding and support and Umbralpilot for super speedy beta.
> 
> Sand is a callback to _Journey to the West_ , obviously, and Hazel is, incidentally, named for the narrator of _Saga_ (which I was reading while working on this).


End file.
